El Vaquero

Issue date: 11/28/07 Section: Features

Media Credit: Graig Agop The Alex Theater, located on Brand Boulevard, has been a Glendale Landmark since it opened in 1925.

Since its grand opening as a silent movie and vaudeville theatre in 1925, the Alex Theatre in Glendale has hosted every trend in filmed entertainment.

The humanities/social lecture presentation is a decade by decade analysis of the fads and features that shaped Hollywood from the Golden Age to the Digital Revolution.

Many people have fond memories of the Alex Theater. With over 2000 seats, the Alex was home to some of the best motion pictures ever released. By the late '50s the size of the theater was altered to accommodate the new cinemascope screen. Although it lost seats, the Alex continued to draw audiences from all over southern California.

Randy Carter, speaker at the humanities lecture is president of the Alex Film Society and a producer and director of movies and television programs. A member of the Directors' Guild of America, he has worked as production manager, assistant director and director. His credits include The Godfather Part II, The Blues Brothers, Cheers and Seinfeld.

"Even with those impressive credits I am actually now exactly where I was in 1973 when I started in the business, said Carter. "I am unemployed and looking for work." The Alex Theater was the valley's premiere theatre house. Many studios would have premieres or sneak previews of their big, upcoming pictures. The first screening at the Alex was a film called "Lightnin' " a 1925 silent film written by John Ford. According to Carter "it's the talkiest silent film I have ever seen."

The first tidalwave of changes that took place in theatres like the Alex, was sound. By 1925 Bell Telephone had perfected a sound-on-disk system for motion pictures. This system, which came to be called Vitaphone, was based on the synchronization of the picture film with a phonograph record.

Despite this technical breakthrough, Hollywood movie studios demonstrated a notable lack of interest in Bell's project. Only Warner Brothers Studio was tempted by the Bell instrument, and even Warners considered talking pictures too risky a novelty. But Warners saw in the Bell machine the possibility of saving money by substituting phonograph records for live musicians.

Continued...

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